Newest S3D not sequence printing?

[jsc]

It is because the time estimates do not take into account accelerations.

There has been some discussion of this in the OctoPrint forum, with one guy having come up with a small program based off the Marlin firmware that does precise gcode completion estimates: https://github.com/foosel/OctoPrint/issues/270 (see the reply from davr on Sept 29, 2013, halfway down).

[Tim]

one guy having come up with a small program based off the Marlin firmware that does precise gcode completion estimates

Interesting discussion; thanks for the link.

I see Jim's point that you have to understand the firmware to get an exact measurement, but I expect that pretty much all firmware is either Marlin or else is doing something similar enough with the acceleration and path planning that an estimate based on the Marlin firmware would be vastly more accurate for others, if not perfect.

[Steve T]

Guess I really didn't pay much attention to the estimate until there was money involved. What a worthless feature, more of a toy than a production feature. Do you suppose the length of filament/cost of filament is bogus too? In my thinking that should be accurate because the program's dealing with length which is easily calculated and not time. Then again, not always extruding the same amount.

Anyway, support S3D got back to me with pretty much a work around, which they don't admit but I did report it as a bug. Interestingly, I opened an old sequence drawing and brought up its related gcode and sliced to find everything went well. Then with the same FFF settings did a new slice in the newest S3D version and walla, crash and burn, crash and burn. To get a sequence print to work I now have to sacrifice vertical lift under ooze control and set it to zero. That setting should not have anything to do with tool clearance between prints. What were they thinking!
Steve

[Tim]

The time to print is very much dependent on speed control in the firmware, and predicting it requires either knowing what the firmware is, or modeling the process of path and acceleration planning, which is what we were discussing a few posts above. The amount of filament should be pretty accurate, as it depends only on the path length, and for that all you need to do is add up all the path distances. The cost will be accurate assuming that you have put in the right amount for the cost of the spool. Of course, that doesn't take into account any of the operational costs other than materials.